SEO Thought Leaders

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO as it’s known in the trade) is a rapidly changing and exciting arena. In fact, the competition is heating up as companies awaken to a universe of marketing opportunities — providing your customers can find you, that is! Where is SEO heading? What are the trends? New opportunities? And, the real issues facing the industry?

In April 2005, MarketingProfs convened international Thought Leaders Summit representing some of the best minds in the field of Search Engine Optimization for answers.

In the 90 minute long session, panel leader Stephan Spencer tapped into the collective wisdom of panelists Cam Balzer (Performics), Christine Churchill (KeyRelevance), Mike Grehan (Smart Interactive), Ammon Johns (Propellernet), Brian Klais (Netconcepts), Barry Lloyd (MakeMeTop), Ian McAnerin (McAnerin Networks), Alan Rimm-Kaufman(Rimm-Kaufman Group LLC), Eric Ward (EricWard.com) and Jill Whalen (High Rankings).

Making a Business Case for SEO

Many upper-level execs have no experience with search engine optimization whatsoever. It may be time to introduce your boss to the concept of the search engines as your company’s virtual sales force.

Without a solid business case, it is nearly impossible to push an SEO agenda within your organization. First, you need to convince your colleagues and website stakeholders (i.e. your IT, merchandising, marketing people and copywriters) the importance of the initiative they are going to undertake. And there’s nothing like a few statistics to get them excited!

Search Engine Marketing Statistics

Estimating market size is a good place to start. In the U.K. for instance, The Department of Trade and Industry reported about sixteen billion pounds was spent online in the quarter to October 2004. That’s something like 13% of all business sales were conducted as a result of someone finding information on a website.

Couple that with statistics revealing 70% of people find a website for the first time through search engines, and one doesn’t have to do a whole lot more to convince people that search engines are probably a very important search medium.

Anyone who reviews their website statistics can tell you that search engine spiders are the most important browser type out there after Internet Explorer. With 80% of your customers using search engines, it makes sense that you should be catering to that army of robots.

Show that search marketing is a part of day-to-day commerce, couple that with potential product sales, and you have a solid business case for SEO.

But there’s a difference between paid optimization and “natural” (also known as “organic”) optimization. The folks responsible for driving large volumes of sales through paid search may not be aware that upwards of 75% or more of all search clicks come from natural (i.e. unpaid) search listings.

One-third of search engine users do not click on sponsored listings, so if you really want to reach your market, the only place that reaches all of them is the natural results.

Keyword research will give you further insight into the products or product categories that are your big drivers. You will also discover niches in the market, which can be filled by both sponsored listings and natural optimization. Armed with this information, you can start to apply metrics to understand the potential prospect universe out there.

SEO ROI

Your people also need to be aware of the effort that needs to go into conducting an SEO campaign. Say there are 10 things that need to be done, 30 things that need to be changed on the website, how much time is that going to take? Balance that out, understand the investment you are going to make, and what the potential payoff is.

Return on investment (ROI) metrics have an amazing power to make your CFO’s eyes light up. Benchmark statistics from specific market areas will give you an indication of the kind of return you can expect to get.

Highlight also the cost of acquiring a new customer. With direct marketing, this can be in the range of five or six dollars offline. Online you are looking at 25 cents. If that’s not a business case for SEO, then we don’t know what is.

Picking a Search Marketing Agency

Everyone wants to be #1 on the Internet for their important keywords, no matter how popular and how competitive the keywords might be (“hotels,” “investments,” “sporting goods,” etc.). Not surprisingly, the expectations of an SEO vendor are often times quite high.

There are a lot of SEO shops that will come in with all guns blazing, making declarations about what they are going to do before even learning about your business.

First of all, you need to talk!

A good SEO agency asks lots of questions — questions about your history with other firms you may have worked with, about what you learned from your experience. your website’s history, and about your knowledge of SEO. They will also of course listen carefully to you as you elaborate on your goals, constraints, and available resources.

Remember, an SEO agency may walk away from your business if your expectations are unrealistic.

More importantly, they will administer an injection of realism about the potential of an SEO campaign.

Search engine optimization needs to be seen as an investment and not an expense.

Paid search is useful to gauge, by proxy, a business case for SEO but that’s really where the analogy ends.

SEO is a Mindset

SEO is not predictable. You have no control over Google or MSN or Yahoo! and what pages they decide to index off of your site or how they are going to rank them.

That fact makes many marketers squeamish because it sounds like we are hedging for failure. That is the reality of the game and the evidence is clearly there in the payoff.

SEO is a mindset. Getting to that stage depends on what percentage of the “to do” list you are willing to implement. In some cases, the cure might be worse than the complaint.

There is resistance to making fundamental changes that, beyond getting pages indexed, can actually help drive traffic through natural search listings. Many marketers are not sure how this will impact on their brand. They want to balance the branding experience and user experience with search requirements.

There are several layers of management, a legal department, a marketing department to negotiate and, in many cases, their hands are tied as to how many changes they can actually make to the website.

Yet, that has no effect on their expectations and what they want from an SEO campaign. It may be a case of sitting down and figuring out exactly what you can and are prepared to do and match that to your expectations.

Search Engine Marketing Success

There are no magic tricks to coming up Number One. Many people think we can perform magic and “whamo!” the next thing you know, you are up in the top 10.

Firstly, we don’t control the search engines. All we can do is endeavor to create content that the search engines will find worthy and rank accordingly.

Secondly, it is important to pop up on the most generic keyword possible. Your content needs to be structured to reflect the products and services you are offering and targeting to your market.

Many websites, such as catalog sites, can run into duplication issues. This is where a manufacturer gives a specific description of a product that you cannot deviate from. For example, it is illegal for a pharmacy to tamper with information about the drugs they are selling, so you have that exact same information being duplicated across every single pharmacy site on the planet . at least the ones that care.

Search Marketing Keywords

There are several basic types of keywords.

There are what you call your volume keywords, things like pharmacy, online pharmacy, buy pharmaceuticals. If you rank well, they will very often bring in a ton of traffic but sometimes a very low percentage of actual buyers. But that percentage, based on the amount of traffic, can be significant so you certainly don’t want to avoid that. But it is also important to point out there are other types of keywords that you can aim at too.

For example, you can aim at niche keywords, where there may be just 20 or 30 a month on each, but almost every one converting into a paying customer. If you are selling things like cars, 20 or 30 a month is a pretty big thing.

Then, of course, there is a blended approach where there is not a lot of competition but a fair amount of traffic. Those are really nice areas to aim at. What kind of keywords do you want to aim at? You may actually get excited about niche keywords that you wouldn.t have thought of originally.

The goal of an SEO campaign is to add value to your website, to increase your business. To be successful, you need a long-term view plus a marketing strategy.

The result you will see in terms of incremental traffic and sales from natural search is, in many respects, dependent upon a willingness to implement the changes that need to happen. In other words, reiterating the importance of having a business case that you can use to get all of your colleagues and stakeholders on board.

Top Performing SEO

A top performing SEO is no different to a top-performing professional in any other field.

There is a fear within the SEO industry that once you let the cat out of the bag and share tactics that need to be implemented, you won’t need us anymore. But not all feel that way. Look for an agency with a partnership model.

Look for transparency. Look for a willingness to put it all on the table and work with you at your pace to implement what can be implemented, and communicate with stakeholder groups involved in the initiative and motivate them.

Consider their business practices. Do they keep you in the loop? Do they properly educate you on what.s expected and do they find out what you want as well as what they intend to deliver to you?

Top-performing SEOs have been around long enough to really understand what is going on in the marketplace. What sets them apart tends to be the extent of their knowledge, and keyword research. Are they using professional copywriters, or do they just stick keywords anywhere? Do they understand the basics of marketing, conversions and, of course, the technical issues?

Do they have an ability to really understand your business beyond the natural search arena? It is important for an agency to offer a full range of search services so you can gain maximum visibility through various marketing channels and work to maximize those channels to garner the best opportunities at the most efficient rates.

Another key indicator is client renewals. There are stories of clients who have had their fingers burned with search engine marketing firms that weren.t up to scratch. If an SEO retains clients for five, six or seven years, then that’s a sign of a company doing its job.

Favorite Search Engines

From an SEO standpoint, there is consensus among our experts. Google (because it re-invented the search interface when everyone else was ferreting around), followed by Yahoo, then MSN, and a yappy little underdog called Teoma.

Despite its size, Teoma.com is a good contender. There is a big technology difference between Teoma and the other “big three”: namely, Teoma does it differently with its localized approach. Teoma certainly explained it best when they said that PageRank and link popularity is a bit like going out into the street and asking everyone who the best scientist is — you are going to get the obvious names. Einstein, Stephen Hawking. They’re popular answers.

Teoma looks within the topic. It finds the authority sites within the topic related to “scientists” and then asks “Who is the best scientist?” Chances are, Teoma is going to come up with names you have never heard of before but are actually much better answers. It gives you the specialist answer instead of the popular answer.

Another difference with Teoma is that it is keyword-dependent. So when you type “blue widgets” into that search box, it pulls the community together and conducts a local search which refines and finds the authoritative sites on that particular subject.

Specialized Search Engines

Tennessee-based Eric Ward has a favorite search engine to add to the mix: a vertical search engine called ElvisFind.com. As the name implies, it’s devoted purely to content about Elvis Presley.

Essentially, he likes what the site represents: the concept that anybody out there with a little bit of technical know-how and a lot of subject-matter expertise or passion can compile and offer a search engine devoted to a specific topic. All they have to do is hand-select the sites that they choose to index and, if they are running a spider, direct the spider to those sites.

Eric’s favorite engine isn’t literally ElvisFind.com, but what ElvisFind.com represents — namely, any engine narrowly targeting a completely arcane or unusual topicsthat only a few thousand people around the world care about, with an enthusiast behind-the-scenes creating the search engine for that niche audience.

What’s Wrong With SEO Today

Is it broke? Can we fix it? What is wrong with the SEO industry today? Well, for one thing, it hasn’t any defined rules of operation; it hasn.t really defined what each individual segment of the market actually does; and it hasn’t really defined what you are meant to get for your money.

You still get people starting up as SEOs by downloading products that promise to turn you into an expert overnight, and who go up to bat against people who have been around for 5, 6, or 7 years with an identical message: “We can get your site ranked on search engines.”

Then there’s the lack of standards, or any list of cross-SEO standards that everybody can agree on. There are too many grey areas in SEO. How about more of “this is an acceptable way of doing things”? Basic standards are in order.

From a SEO vendor perspective, it seems the focus is on self-preservation; providing services that may not be actually valuable to the client. Providing keyword research every month or making doorway pages or metatags, is not high-value. It may be a way of justifying fees, but that is where the problem starts. Results come when the focus is on doing what’s right for the customer, and helping them make the changes that need to happen.

The Future of NSO / SEO

Gazing into the crystal ball The panel figures that, looking ahead to the next couple years, the growing importance of localization and personalization within the search engines will cause a big shake-up to the SEO industry.

SEO vendors who have been making easy promises, based on what they have picked up in the last couple of years, are going to struggle to keep up, given what’s coming. Search rankings will no longer be as easy to predict, or as easy to manipulate.

Consequently, consolidation (or rationalization) within the industry will occur. SEO vendors who aren’t up to the task will crash and burn, further separating the wheat from the chaff.

We are going to see SEO practitioners becoming more rounded in terms of the services they offer their clients. You are already seeing companies who started off in optimization taking on board bid management, web analytics, ROI tracking and providing a whole range of services that are related to internet marketing, not just search marketing.

Innovations in Search Engines

As if optimizing a website for three major search engines and separate algorithms at once weren’t difficult enough, new innovation will see search engines develop and launch local search, personalized search, and desktop search across many online channels at once.

It is no longer as easy as: “Well, just optimize your website for Google and you will be okay.” There are many factors involved and search is pervasive. And it.s touching all aspects of the online world.

Data feeds will drive particular areas of search, even within natural search. As a by-product of that, let’s go way out on a limb here and predict the death of the keyword..

Search engines will get better at understanding what the user is looking for in the context of their query. They will also get better at understanding what a page is actually about, as opposed to which keywords are on the page. Keywords are no longer going to be magic; this is going to result in a fundamental shift in the way the industry works.

The Future of Paid Search

We will see the blending of paid and unpaid search. Search engines are public companies with enormous money at stake. It is going to look more like product placement in the movies.

Search is going to leave the desktop. Envision an iPod-esque device with GPS that not only plays your MP3s but also serves as your all-information-at-your-fingertips device on your hip, using those search as universal encyclopedia knowledge bases. This is probably two or three years out, but it’s coming.

Imagine trust being purchased, authority and subjects being purchased and bartered between sites, and strong XML categorization tags being pushed across where people would agree on some sort of hierarchy . a super Dewey Decimal system – as to how content could be characterized for the good of the whole web.

Search Engine Evolution

Search engines are going to stop looking for websites and start looking for information. People will pull answers from answers.com or Encarta and add maps and stock quotes and try to create an information portal, so that every time you type in a search it will be an information portal aimed at what you are looking for.

An important scientist in this field explained the two-galaxy approach to research. The first galaxy is the search engine optimization galaxy; the content creators. And we are the guys who control that. The other galaxy is the end user and the search engines control the end user.

The engines have a goldmine of data about their users, and they are starting to put that data to good use. Personalization could well be the death of the keyword. Typing in “blue widgets” and coming up #1 will mean absolutely nothing, because it will depend on who is typing it in at what time of the day and at what part of the world they are in.

If we hope to successfully compete for search engine traffic long-term, we need to re-set our sights on both galaxies. Search engine optimization will be about offering relevant solutions to searchers’ problems as defined by a combination of search criteria, keywords notwithstanding.

Search Engine Spam

Can the spam!

I hit our panel with a tough question that even the mighty search engines haven’t been able to solve, namely: what can, or should, be done to get rid of search engine spam? I focused the discussion on what isn’t already being done.

To date, trying to get everyone in the SEO industry to agree on any sort of guidelines or standards around search engine spam has been almost impossible. The greatest difficulty is that those who control content — the content authors and editors — have a vested interest in getting as highly ranked as possible.

Thus, the objectives of the search engines and of web content authors are not aligned. However, with blogs, it’s in the blogger’s best interest to keep the comment spam to a minimum, because it erodes trust in the value of their content. The href rel=’nofollow’ tag — now supported by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN — is an easy-to-implement solution that ameliorates the problem for both the bloggers and the search engines. Finding similar common ground between the search engines and content authors is the way forward.

Search engines could — and should — be doing more to let webmasters know they are actually derailing their own future. And the engines are ignoring a great PR opportunity of rallying the cause. Search engines aren’t helping themselves, because they aren’t publicly bringing clarity to the issues around spam for webmasters, other than at conferences and in the online forums. For example, when exactly is cloaking spam and when is it not?

Reputable Sites and Search Engines

As search engines mature, we are likely to see a combination of spam solutions emerging that will involve technology, the community and the marketplace. But first, they need to determine what is a “reputable site.” PageRank algorithms do that, but better technology — who is referencing whom, and who can be trusted — will emerge.

From a technological point of view, we have already seen search engines adapt and move on. Future developments are likely to include the surveying of the clicks that are made off of the search results and the incorporation of the data into the determination of relevance.

On the community side, we are likely to see more in the way of whitelisting services, professional certification, professional organizations and Better Business Bureau stamps of approval. Longer-term, we wouldn’t be surprised if there were even ways to purchase credibility, like a Better Business seal, a bonded program (like IronPort’s Bonded Sender), or an SSL certificate . a central authority for a nominal fee that might say these people are transparent.

We have to remember that ultimately, the problem belongs to the search engines. It is up to them to do something about it. Certainly as search engines head into the third phase, i.e. personalization, they will push for wide adoption of the “nofollow” tag on links. But that will only go some of the way towards solving the problem, with so many millions of abandoned blogs out there collecting comment spam continuously.

Search Engine Tricks

Tne man’s spam is another’s clever strategy, particularly in Europe where the environment is more liberal. So one has to determine what is ethical and what is not for oneself.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! admitted at a Search Engine Strategies conference that he understood there are different expectation levels when people get involved in this game. Applying classic SEO tactics if you are aiming to be #1 for Viagra is a bit like turning up at a gunfight with a sword. It’s not viable.

Cloaking is supposedly unethical, right? But it was applied successfully in a recent campaign for a TV media company, where the site being optimized was completely audio-visual. Type the name of the main character into Google and the site in question came up #1. So we have a situation where Google served up the most relevant, and most appropriate result. The end user was absolutely delighted. Some people would say that was unethical. But if everybody was so happy, why would it be?

Cloaking and Search Engines

“Cloaking” is a method of showing search engine crawlers a different page to that which you would see with your browser.

If you have a list of all the IP addresses for all of the search engine crawlers, when you see one of those IP addresses show up on your site, you can, for example, serve them a different page which is text-heavy and full of all the keywords that you want — versus, a visitor who gets the page full of Flash movies.

Cloaking is totally acceptable to search engines if they allow you to do it through a commercial arrangement. To be frank, trusted feeds are cloaking. This is where you put content into an XML format and send it to a search engine, asking them to rank your pages based on the XML-formatted text that you have sent in.

Even Google states that cloaking is okay in certain circumstances, particularly if you are fixing URLs to make them more spiderable and not really playing games with the content itself.

In the end, it’s all about client disclosure. The client needs to be fully aware of the SEO vendor’s tactics that will be utilized in the optimization of his/her site, and of the potential benefits and/or pitfalls that may occur. Nondisclosure by the SEO vendor of potential risks of the vendor’s optimization strategy is possibly the most unethical thing an SEO vendor can do.

The consensus of the panel was to adhere to the search engines’ published guidelines and optimize your site accordingly. If you work in a very competitive industry and as such, you don’t care about the tactics used, you really should rethink that. You are treading on dangerous ground.

Ethical vs. Unethical SEO

Is it unethical? Or is it just “tactics” (and therefore acceptable)?

Search engines like to take the hard line and categorize things as either black or white. In some cases, they are actually grey.

A pet peeve of panelists was the engines’ opposition to link-buying.

Say you are an artist and have a local frame shop you like to recommend. In turn, the frame shop might give you a small referral fee for sending all your wonderful clients their way. The online version of this is a link from the artist’s website to the frame shop.s website. It makes sense. It’s good marketing. It’s good business and that is what link-building and link buying is all about.

Many times, a link is a great lead generator. Let.s take the artist and the frame shop example again. You might get tons of traffic from that artist’s shop. It is a great business link.

You might buy links for credibility. Taken to the extreme, your link from the local Chamber of Commerce could be considered link buying.

Legitimate vs. Illegitimate SEO Methods

Some techniques are misconstrued as always unethical, whereas in actuality they can have legitimate uses.

For example, the noscript tag is a perfectly acceptable way to assist search engines and browsers that can’t read script or JavaScript. There’s nothing wrong with putting your links in the noscript tag if you have, say, a DHTML menu that can’t be read. The search engines have no problem with that. Of course, the noscript tag can be abused in unethical ways, such as by hiding links within a noscript tag that you wish only for search engines to find and never the users.

The same logic applies to the noframes tag.

If you don’t have a framed site, inserting a noframes tag full of keywords is spamming. But if you have a framed site and you’re summarizing the content contained within that frameset, then you are just helping the search engines get to the information they are trying to get to anyways.

Finding an Ethical SEO Vendor

How to find out if a SEO vendor is ethical?

It is an interesting sign of the times when you have to ask a vendor whether what they are doing is ethical. Obviously, they are going to say: “Yes, of course what we do is ethical.”

Luckily, there are things you can do to connect the dots. For starters, it is really important to talk to the potential SEO vendor extensively. They should explain the techniques they will be using. Are they telling you they use proprietary techniques? That’s a warning sign. Do their techniques involve any kind of deception? Again, a warning sign.

Don’t be afraid to ask really hard questions of the potential vendor, like

• Do you do doorway pages?
• Do you do deceptive redirects?
• Have you ever had sites banned?

If they start back-peddling and talking about how SEO tactics are short-term, you might want to reconsider. SEO is a long-term investment. Done right, the benefits of SEO should last for years.

Long-term SEO Results

Another way to re-cast the issue around ethical behavior is to evaluate whether the SEO vendor’s business practices are sustainable, i.e. likely to deliver long-term results to their clients. One question you might ask is the average length of time they have worked with their clients. A lot of client turnover indicates the SEO may not be taking a long-term approach.

Talk to both previous and current clients if you can. Are they happy with them? Have those clients. traffic and sales gone up?

Avoid SEO vendors who offer rank guarantees. You can’t guarantee something you have no control over. The only way you can get a guaranteed rank is through pay-per-click. While we would all agree that search rankings can’t be guaranteed, sometimes the workmanship CAN be guaranteed — i.e. that the work promised can be delivered to specification and, if the client is not satisfied, the vendor will either refund the money or make it right.

Another warning sign is if you receive unsolicited email (i.e. spam) from an SEO vendor. An ethical SEO vendor who generates long-term results doesn’t need to advertise in such a fashion.

Do due diligence and ensure that the SEO vendor is going to deliver on their promises. If they say: .We don’t do anything deceptive,. and then you go to one of their client sites and you see a bunch of hidden text and links and so forth, then obviously, they are already lying to you.

SEO: Looking Under The Hood

There are ways to take a look under the hood and verify the SEO vendor’s claims.

For example, examine what their clients’ websites are serving to the search engines.

There are a couple different ways to view a website through the eyes of a search engine spider: one is through a Firefox browser extension called User Agent Switcher; the other is through the cached version of the page that was indexed by the engine, available from the Cached link in the search results.

Compare and contrast the page meant for the search engines to that corresponding page off the native website as seen by a normal visitor.

If the content served up to the search engines is something completely different than what is served up to visitors, then they are spamming. Typical things to look for are when making your comparison: if the title tag is significantly different, and if keywords have been stuffed into the meta tags and into parts of the website to help the version that was shown to search engines rank better.

Avoiding SEO Scams

Do a quick search on the Internet to see if people out there have posted complaints about that company. You can also check the online forums, and sites like SEOPros.com and SEOConsultants.com that take a closer look at their websites and clients prior to inclusion.

In short, do your research before you spend money on SEO. Get educated, perhaps by attending one or two industry conferences, to really appreciate the complexities involved. Not only will you go into the engagement with eyes wide open about ethical boundaries, you’ll also be more receptive to their good ideas.

Optimizing Web Site Usability

Optimizing a site for both SEO and usability Usability is a term often talked about in relation to website best practices. Are these twin objectives of usability and optimization at odds or are they harmonious? Are they two processes or are they one?

Think of it this way: search engine spiders are just another visitor to your website. They just they happen to be a visitor that refers a lot of other visitors to your website. That particular visitor always just happens to be “disabled”: it can’t read your graphics, or view your Java applets and Flash movies, or fill out your forms. So usability really does go hand-in-hand with search engine optimization. You are making your website usable to the search engine spider.

The same tactics you would use to deal with someone who is blind, or someone who has difficulty understanding high-tech ways of navigating through a site, should also apply to a search engine spider.

A first view of a website should be from a usability standpoint. You are wasting your money if you are going to spend a lot on SEO and achieve wonderfully high rankings, but your site is unusable and can’t sell anything. You can and should construct a site for both human usability and spider readability.

Linking Strategy The panel was in agreement that linking is where the action is. Putting together a really comprehensive linking strategy is one of the most important things you are ever going to do to garner high rankings. Getting a site indexed is not that difficult. Ranking is. And remember, we are talking about quality links.

SEO boils down to making the best possible site you can, which is content, and then telling as many people as possible about it, which is links.
SEO and Content Get the content right so your website deserves to be in the position that you want it to be in, and then get the links to let the search engines know that you are there and that there is some content there worth visiting. Put the two together and you end up with a very powerful package.

When looking at your site content, remember that every page on your website is a potential entry point. As stated above, make sure it is usable both by surfers who actually visit that site and can navigate out of it, and also by search engines. Also make sure that every page is viewed as a separate potential entry point and hire a copywriter to ensure that the copy is effective.

Your site is like a virtual sales force in the search engines. And it’s those content pages or product pages on your site that can really drive a lot of traffic.

SEO and Page Templates

Cast a very broad net by tuning the templates of those pages, especially if your site is database driven, so that every single page of content is performing at its maximum in the search engines.

That broad net can catch a lot more fish than just a couple of rods and reels, i.e. only focusing on optimizing a handful of your pages for high-volume keywords.

Links and the RSS Secret Weapon

Up until a couple years ago, nobody ever really asked about links as it related to search engines. People wanted links only because they knew that links would help bring them traffic from those partner sites.

Now the majority of inquiries relate to:

• What will you charge us to get 100 links, or
• Our site has a PageRank three. What will you charge us to boost that to a PageRank seven?

This has created a climate where people have become obsessed with the types of links they get to the detriment, long term, of their site.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, offers an opportunity to elevate the discussion to a new level. Not only does RSS offer a syndication channel you can use to get links, it’s also a new channel to reach your end-users in a way that is convenient to them.

The interesting thing about feed content is we are not yet sure if search engines are currently indexing the underlying XML or RSS.

The whole nature of RSS content is that it changes so quickly. By the time an engine indexes it, and somebody searches on it, the underlying content has changed.

It might matter less from the standpoint of search engine optimization; but before deciding to offer some of your content as an RSS feed, it is important to recognize that there are many, many venues out there that will want to know about those feeds.

RSS and SEO

For instance, there is Yahoo with the My Yahoo page. Millions of people now have their own personal Yahoo page, where they get their news and weather, stock quotes, etcetera.

By offering content as an RSS feed with a little “Add to my Yahoo page” button on your site, with just one click people can make your content part of their daily visit to their My Yahoo page.

It is all about having a clickable link that automatically subscribes people to a feed, and getting those clickable links on the web.

Many of those already implementing RSS have an RSS feed and XML file available on their website, however tracking of the readership of that probably hasn.t crossed their minds.

With RSS search engines and people out there pinging the content every five minutes, every ten minutes, every hour, every two hours — that shows up in your server log as an access — a request for that RSS file.

More sophistication is called for in order to be able to say: “Well how many accesses of an RSS feed were actually because people wanted to read it, or were from search engines pinging it to see if it has been updated?.”

What’s interesting about this type of content delivery is, ultimately, an RSS feed still has an address like any web page; whether it is a page served by Microsoft Active Server, a .html file or even a pdf file, or any document or file that is addressable on the web, including an RSS file — typically indexable by a search engine.

RSS Feeds and Search Engines

Let’s say you have some sites that syndicate an RSS feed onto their own homepage.

For example, nanodot.org syndicates Slashdot’s latest headlines from their RSS feed on their homepage, so that gives Slashdot ten links. That would be one way to look at it from an off-page criteria standpoint.

If you don’t have an RSS feed today and you work on one for a week and launch it next Monday, you now have around 50 to 75 venues out there that you can go get new links for.

Sites will link to your feed URLs and you can submit your site to the feed search engines. There are tremendous feed search engines out there that happily accept submissions of RSS feeds and really, that is the same thing as accepting a submission of a link.

You could increase link popularity by getting links to your feed in addition to your homepage or to any other content on your site. A feed is just another element of a site that’s linkable.

What search engines will have to decide is, do we want to index feed content given how often it is going to potentially update? I don’t see there being a whole lot of impact for SEO yet, but it will.